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useful,' goes the refrain, `to be able to talk. How much more efficient people would have been if they
could talk. Speech makes it much more likely that hunters and farmers will survive/'
Scholars who favour such rubbish have evidently never ploughed a field nor stalked game, where
silence is the order of the day, not jabber/ People out in the fields weeding do not usually talk. They
talk only when they rest. In the plains of East Africa the hunter with the best kill rate is the wild dog,
yet middle-aged professors short of wind and agreeing never to talk nor signal are much better at
catching the beeste and the gazelle than any wild dog. The lion that roars and the dogs that bark will
starve to death if enough silent humans are hunting with their bare hands.
Language is not for practical affairs/ Jonathan Bennett tells a story about language beginning when
one ` tribesman' warns another that a coconut is about to fall on the second native's head.' Native One
does this first by an overacted mime of bonking on the head, and later on does this by uttering a
warning and thereby starting language. I bet that no coconut ever fell on any tribesman's head except
in racist comic strips, so I doubt this fantasy. I prefer a suggestion about language attributed to the
Leakey family who excavate Olduvai gorge. The idea is that people invented language out of boredom.
Once we had fire, we had nothing to do to pass away the long evenings, so we started telling jokes.
This fancy about the origin of language has the great merit of regarding speech as something human.
It fixates not on tribesmen in the tropics but on people.
Imagine homo depictor beginning to use sounds that we might translate as `real', or, `that's how it is',
said of a clay figurine or a daub on the wall. Let discourse continue as `this real, then that real', or,
more idiomatically, ` if this is how it is, then that is how it is too'. Since people are argumentative,
other sounds soon express, `no, not that, but this here is real instead'.
((footnote:))
i J/ Bennett, `The meaning-nominalist strategy', Foundations of Language to (1973), pp/
141-68/
((136))
In such a fantasy we do not first come to the names and descriptions, or the sense and reference of
which philosophers are so fond. Instead we start with the indexicals, logical constants, and games of
seeking and finding. Descriptive language comes later, not as a surrogate for depiction but as other
uses for speaking are invented.
Language then starts with `this real', said of a representation/ Such a story has to its credit the fact
that `this real' is not at all like `You Tarzan, Me Jane', for it stands for a complicated, that is,
characteristically human, thought, namely that this wooden carving shows something real about what
it represents.
This imagined life is intended as an antidote to the deflating character of the quotation with which I
began: Reality is an anthropomorphic creation. Reality may be a human creation, but it is no toy; on
the contrary it is the second of human creations. The first peculiarly human invention is
representation. Once there is a practice of representing, a second-order concept follows in train. This
is the concept of reality, a concept which has content only when there are first-order representations.
It will be protested that reality, or the world, was there before any representation or human
language. Of course/ But conceptualizing it as reality is secondary. First there is this human thing,
the making of representations. Then there was the judging of representations as real or unreal, true or
false, faithful or unfaithful/ Finally comes the world, not first but second, third or fourth.
In saying that reality is parasitic upon representation, I do not join forces with those who, like
Nelson Goodman or Richard Rorty, exclaim, `the world well lost!' The world has an excellent place,
even if not a first one. It was found by conceptualizing the real as an attribute of representations.
Is there the slightest empirical evidence for my tale about the origin of language? No. There are only
straws in the wind. I say that representing is curiously human/ Call it species specific. We need only
run up the evolutionary tree to see that there is some truth in this. Drug a baboon and paint its face,
then show it a mirror. It notices nothing out of the ordinary. Do the same to a chimpanzee. It is
terribly upset, sees there is paint on its face and tries to get if off. People, in turn, like mirrors to study
their make-up. Baboons will never draw pictures. The student of language, David Premack, has
((138))
ivory carving of a person, perhaps a god, in what we call formal or lifeless style. I see the gold leggings
and cloak in which the ivory was dressed. It is engraved in the most minute and ` realistic' detail with
scenes of bull and lion. The archaic and the realistic objects in different media are made in what the
archaeologists say is the same period. I do not know what either is for. I do know that both are
likenesses. I see the archaic bronze charioteer with its compelling human deep-set eyes of semi-
precious stone. How, I ask, could craftspeople so keen on what we call lifeless forms work with others
who breathed life into their creations? Because different crafts using different media evolve at
different rates? Because of a forgotten combination of unknown purposes? Such subtle questions are
posed against a background of what we take for granted/ We know at least this: these artifacts are
representations/
We know likeness and representation even when we cannot answer, likeness to what? Think of the
strange little clay figures on which are painted a sketch of garments, but which have, instead of
heads, little saucer shaped depressions, perhaps for oil. These finger-high objects litter Mycenae. I
doubt that they represent any-thing in particular. They most remind me of the angel-impressions
children make by lying in the snow and waving their arms and legs to and fro to create the image of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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